


Cubits Between

by miraphora



Series: Lose Your Soul [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-scarif, Yavin 4, i still can't believe i went for it with that line
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 05:56:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10713570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraphora/pseuds/miraphora
Summary: There aren’t enough cubits in the entirety of Base One for him to walk off this turmoil.





	Cubits Between

**Author's Note:**

> The interval between the return from Eadu and the gathering of the Council on Yavin IV before Scarif has bugged me since day one because there's no way these two people transition to that fragile peace without talking again, so I'm exploring it. I have no idea if it's covered in the novelization, but I'm doubling down on my refusal to pay $15 for the ebook right now.
> 
> This bit is probably the start of a short series of drabbles in this timeline?

_You might as well be a stormtrooper._

Her words eat at him like the acid that’s been gnawing through the lining of his stomach since Kafrene. 

He’s never had trouble with orders before. Draven is harsh, suspicious, with the sort of big-holovid view of the events tied tenuously together on his spider web that leads to hard choices and a cold calculus weighing entire star systems against individual lives--but Cassian understands that. He’s been fighting since he was six years old and the Separatist movement ripped a hole in his family and left him orphaned and alone. 

He understands the cost of a cause. The price of rebellion. Sometimes, it’s the smile of a pretty girl. The strained pleadings of a frightened man, cut short with a blaster shot in the back. The lives of civilian beings in a manufactory supplying KDY.

It can be steep, but all it costs is his soul.

He tells himself that it’s her. That she’s a raven-thorn in his side, irritating his skin, scoring his flesh, and that nothing she says--that nothing from a common criminal like that has any bearing on his life at all. 

He is a consummate liar, and when he tells himself that this niggling doubt, this unseemly uncertainty, began with the arrival of Jyn Erso in his life, for a time he forgets the way his gorge rose on Kafrene, his easy lying smile falling apart as his informant collapsed next to the bodies of the stormtroopers. For a time he forgets the moment of hesitation as he stood over the wreckage of his cause, the ease of taking lives unexpectedly shocking him, until he climbed desperately from that dead-end alley.

Jyn Erso, he reminds himself, sitting on the edge of his stiff bunk, the durasteel frame digging into the backs of his thighs--Jyn Erso is only here because he *found* her. She is, if anything, a torment of his own design.

Is that, he wonders, why she sounds like a conscience?

He levers himself up from the bunk, paces to the cramped desk where his datapad sits. Taps the screen with feigned purpose, scrolls through a report in a perfunctory manner. Paces back toward the door, compulsively hanging his parka in the tiny shadow of a closet. Paces back toward the desk and realizes what he’s doing, as his fingertips tap at the datapad again, and stops short with a bitten-off curse. 

There aren’t enough cubits in the entirety of Base One for him to walk off this turmoil. 

Startlingly emotive green eyes flash in his mind. _You can’t talk your way around this._

What does she know?

\---

It’s a large base and he’s only a captain, but that rank is in Intelligence, not Infantry, and that distinction comes with its own dubious advantages. He taps his fingers restlessly, unconsciously, on a console as he scrolls through billeting assignments. They’re using her Hallik alias in official channels, for whatever good it will do. The meeting before Jedha was senior staff and Intelligence only, but the meeting that’s coming will be heavily attended by the Council and ranking officers--there’ll be no keeping her identity quiet after that.

The corners of his mouth pull down a bit, a line creasing vertically in the center of his forehead, when he can’t find her. He turns his head, watching a hurried aide with markers of Senate staff draw nearer, clearly en route to an appointment she’s already late for. The tender fluff of her Bothan face is ruffling with agitation. 

Cassian intercepts her with casual ease. “Counselor.”

She makes a soft thrumming sound of surprise, sidling cautiously on quiet footpads. “Captain Andor.”

Mon Mothma’s or Organa’s then. Few of the other Council members’ staff knew him on sight. In either case, it means she’s likely to have the information he wants. “Perhaps you can assist me,” he says smoothly, face deceptively open but professional. The face of a colleague, rather than an interrogator. “Our...guest...requires additional debriefing, but my intel seems to be a few hours old. Has she been billeted in a common room?”

The Bothan’s vulpine face is suddenly much harder to read. “The...ah. The barracks are quite full, Captain. She has been given a bed in the...ah. The brig. With a...ah. Honor guard,” she finishes, with a twitch of her lips that bares an uncertain hint of incisor. 

Cassian frowns before he can capture the expression. 

“Mon Mothma thought it prudent, under the circumst--”

Cassian inclines his head before she can finish, finding a false smile in the empty place where they live inside of him. “My thanks, Counselor.”

He leaves her looking slightly fretful, and wonders how many cubits lie between him and the rarely-used brig.

\---

There is a guard at the bottom of the narrow stone tunnel, an Ithorian ensign who fidgets nervously and seems uncertain whether they should be focusing on the occupant or on any approach. They look up the tunnel as Cassian descends, and salute with a certain measure of relief at the sight of his captain’s bars. 

“Captain.”

“Ensign. I need to speak with Miss Hallik. If you would move your post to the top of the stairs?”

“Yes, sir.”

Cassian takes a moment to inspect the brig, pacing towards the single open grate with no urgency until he can see its occupant. She is seated on the bunk suspended from the stone wall, a curious retrofit on an ancient temple, like all of their modifications. Her hair hangs in her face, though she is clean, and dry, and has obviously been shown to a ‘fresher since their return. Her shoulders are straight and narrow, hands braced on the frame of the bunk. She doesn’t look like a woman overcome with delayed grief, but then, she doesn’t seem to be the sort to wallow. She clings to moments--not to lingering aches.

He has had to pull her away from her losses enough times now to recognize the difference.

She is watching him, waiting for him to speak, much like she had during the meeting with Mon Mothma and Draven. 

“I wanted to make sure you had been given a room. A chance to rest.” It seems a noncommittal enough way to begin.

Her brow quirks. She gestures to the brig. “As you can see, the Rebellion has only the finest accommodations for their pawns. Very poor at entertaining, though. I thought I’d have guests.”

Exasperation, the same heat that had him pacing in his bunk, pricks beneath his skin. “The Rebellion doesn’t keep political prisoners.”

“Don’t they?” she asks significantly. 

He studies her face, trying to understand her. Or maybe he’s trying to understand himself, and the way she affects him. 

There’s nothing special about the way she reacts to stimuli or manipulation--everything he’s seen of her confirms that she is driven by emotion, more like a civilian than a soldier. Her instincts have two modes that he can identify: self-preservation, and self-sacrifice. The latter is triggered almost entirely by the perceived endangerment of those weaker than herself. He doesn’t dislike it. It exasperates him, because it makes her erratic and prone to disobedience. But he doesn’t dislike it. 

He doesn’t, he realizes, as their eyes remain locked and her mouth begins to quirk with uncertainty, dislike her at all. But he maybe dislikes himself. Maybe that, after all, is why he has come here, crossing the cubits that separate them, to face her again.

“You’re not a prisoner, Jyn.”

“Can I leave, then?” she shoots back, with brief, prickly heat.

He leans back against the rough stone wall, hands folded over his stomach with casual dismissal he doesn’t feel. He’s used to telegraphing things he doesn’t feel. He was good at it. Before her. He lets his gaze drift over the open hatch of the cell, hears the muted scrape of stone up the tunnel where her guard has discreetly distanced themself. There’s nothing between her and freedom but the weight of responsibility. The weight of knowledge. 

“Can you?” he asks, measured, meaningful, one brow arched.

Their staring contest continues for another heartbeat, and another. It is a little like the intimacy of interrogation, the knowledge that if he gave his prisoner one brief glimpse of mercy, everything inside of them would crumble, and their secrets would spill out, into his waiting, bloodied hands. 

But his question isn’t merciful and there is nothing in her of surrender. Not now. Not after Jedha.

Her full lips pull sidelong into a wry smile. “After everything I said to you on Eadu? I may be a common criminal, Cassian, but I’m not a hypocrite.” 

He inspects that, more objective now that he’s not dripping with the mineral-heavy rain of Eadu or trying to suppress the tremors of adrenaline and the realization of his own agency. Her words can be heavily barbed, bursting like shrapnel, but there’s no bite to this, no accusation. He had accused her on Eadu of being in shock, of lashing out senselessly, but if anything they had both been shaken and reeling. If anything, he was the hypocrite, but she wasn’t accusing him of that now. A killer, though… He supposes he is still that. To her.

They lapse into silence, her expression curious, searching, and he, strangely, relaxes under it. He has already been debriefed, he has no urgent business to attend to, unless he is called up to assist with Council escorts and security--Draven is never happy when too many Councilors are in one place at a time. 

He finds it strange to be so comfortable in her presence, when he was so restless above, and yet it feels natural.

She draws one knee up to her chest, wincing slightly at the pull of still-fresh bruises. He opens his mouth, to ask if she has allowed herself to be checked out by a medical droid. She speaks before he can say anything at all.

“Why didn’t you do it?” Her voice is quiet, not brash or challenging as it has been before. 

Perhaps he is not to be comfortable after all. His eyes slide shut, and he feels the corners of his mouth drag down again. It gets heavier to lift them. Every day. 

“Does it matter? It doesn’t change that he’s dead.”

He waits, ears keener with his eyes shut, and hears the soft scrape of her boots, the creak of the durasteel cable as her slight weight leaves the prison bunk. He listens to his heartbeat, times it to each breath, remembers the way it galloped as his finger stroked the trigger with the first hints of unease. It had seemed simple before Jedha, when he got his orders. Simple to give an alert, obedient nod, to consider what to do with Jyn Erso after a meeting with Saw Gerrera had been secured. How long could you use an asset like her, before it was less trouble to retire her? He had never bothered before to find out.

She still has his blaster, and has had every opportunity to kill him. There are some statistical probabilities he doesn’t want to hear from Kay, but he knows he has trusted her with his life in a way that is incredibly, tremendously stupid.

It’s not a blaster barrel that touches his chest, though. It’s her hand: small, slim, scrape-knuckled and burned, tucked into a fingerless glove. She presses it over his heart, and as the breath goes thin in his lungs, he wonders if she can feel it thundering.

“I have decided,” she says slowly, picking her words more carefully than he has yet heard her do, “that it matters to me.”

He takes another shallow breath, opens his eyes to find hers waiting. The tension in her shoulders and hips tells him she is poised to retreat--she would not call it that, but her entire body wants to put space between them. Her eyes are less certain.

There are many things he could say. _The things that men like Saw Gerrera, like me, do are necessary. They are not pretty. They are not kind. They are the darkness that makes room for hope._ He doesn’t say it, not because it’s bantha shit, but it isn’t what she’s asking for. Cassian isn’t sure she even knows what she’s asking for, but--

“Your face is an open book to me.” 

Her fingers curl inward reflexively, and she has already begun pulling back when he reaches up to tenderly drag his knuckles down her cheek, barely brushing her skin.

“That was not a story I could bear to write on it.”


End file.
